10 Sectors That Will Profit Big-Time From Oil's Crash

Oil prices are tumbling down. Bad news for companies and petro states, but great news at the pump and for these ten industries...

Oil is a dirty business with a dirty little secret: it touches almost everything about modern life.

Out of the 42 gallons in a standard barrel of crude oil, a little under half goes to making gasoline. The rest goes into a vast range of products that underpin the modern world. From plastics to fertilizers and pharmaceuticals, oil is practically a wonder substance when it comes to raw versatility. Arguably, society relies on it more than any other single substance.

All of which, it should be added, is yet another good reason to burn less of the stuff (if watching a trillion tons of Antarctica float away isn't motivation enough). The sun can power cars and heat our homes, but it can't make football helmets.

And that's where the price of oil can have some wide-ranging and weird affects. Over the past several decades the price of oil has fallen dramatically due in large part to new drilling techniques and revolutions in extracting oil from previously hard-to-reach geology such as shale and sand. In fact, it's coming out of the ground so fast that investors expect oil to dip below $40 per barrel at the rate it's going.